Justice Department Considering Hate Charge In Trayvon Martin Shooting

The Justice Department is seeking to discover if racial bias played a role in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

So far, only one such clue has surfaced publicly against 28-year-old George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who fatally shot the 17-year-old Martin on Feb. 26 in the central Florida town of Sanford. On one of his 911 calls to police that night, Zimmerman muttered something under his breath that some listeners say sounds like a racial slur. Zimmerman’s father is white, and his mother is Hispanic.

“It sounds pretty obvious to me,” said Donald Tibbs, a Drexel University law professor who has closely studied race, civil rights and criminal procedure. “If that was a racial epithet that preceded the attack on Trayvon Martin, we definitely have a hate crime.”

Others, however, say the recording is not clear enough to determine what Zimmerman actually said. And many experts say more evidence would be needed that he harbored racial prejudice against black people and went after Martin for that reason alone. There had previously been burglaries in the complex committed by young black males, possibly heightening Zimmerman’s suspicions when he spotted Martin.